Cheating Husbands: Demons or Studly Heroes?

Men and women tend to have different views about married guys who bed a lot of other women. If an old goat is managing to attract a pretty young thing half his age, many men will admire his prowess and wish that they could do the same thing. Women, especially if they’re older and of a similar age to the man’s wife, will tend to consider the guy to be seriously sleazy.

Many people I know are very inconsistent in their attitudes towards cheating. When Vera told her aunt Mavis about her husband Bill’s infidelity, the aunt was shocked and no longer wanted to talk to him ever again. This was despite the fact that Mavis had had several affairs of her own. Jerry’s best friend Eric was quite a player and although married, would find sex wherever he could get it. Jerry simply accepted that was just the way Eric was. Yet when one of his female friends confided in him about her husband’s affairs, he considered the man to be a total cad and not worth staying with. Clearly adultery is fine if you or a close friend is involved in it, but a terrible act if you or someone you’re close to is the person cheated upon.

In my book, Adulterer’s Wife: How to Thrive Whether You Stay or Not, I write in detail about the importance of choosing confidantes well and not venting to everyone. Some of your friends will react in such a negative way that you might have thought you’d married an ax murderer rather than a common-or-garden adulterer. You might find that although you’re happy to refer to him as a total asshole, you don’t want to listen to your friends harping on about him. Perhaps your cheating cad of a husband is extremely creative or works in a field where he helps a lot of people. A friend who really admired your partner before finding out about his long-term mistress now might believe he has no redeeming features at all. Yet was disgraced New York Governor Elliott Spitzer’s crusade against Wall Street villains any less laudable because he was bonking high-class call girls? Did JFK’s many affairs take away from his stature as a president? Does the fact that Albert Einstein was a philanderer affect his standing as one of the greatest minds in theoretical physics of the twentieth century? You might disagree with me, but I would say not.

One problem is that Americans tend to see situations in rather black and white terms. Someone is either a good guy or a bad guy. Then when people are talking about themselves, they’re likely to be the hero of their own story. They’ll have a positive spin on whatever they do. Europeans tend to take a more nuanced view and consider the whole person, warts and all, good points and bad. Yes, I’m a Brit, so of course I’m biased in this analysis, but if you compare the ways characters are depicted in European versus American large and small screens, you’ll see the difference. Think Craig Charles’ Dave Lister from Red Dwarf versus William Shatner’s Captain Kirk from Star Trek.

In The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating, psychologist and researcher David M. Buss describes in detail the evolutionary underpinnings of men’s bad behavior. It’s a fascinating but ultimately depressing book, at least for women. According to numerous studies quoted in the book, male and female decision-making across the globe as regards short- and long-term sexual relationships is transactional. It is based on a fairly standard set of attributes perceived as valuable in the opposite sex, with many similarities to mating behavior in the animal kingdom. Men and women are frequently at odds as to what they desire in a partner, leading to a considerable amount of deception, jealously and conflict between the sexes.

If it weren’t for the constraints pesky women put upon guys, refusing their advances if they’ve only known each other for an hour or two and expecting emotional commitment, men would happily spread their seed far and wide to as many pretty young girls that they could find. There’s really nothing special or unusual about infidelity or about a man going for a babe two or three decades younger. It’s all part of his biological imperative to pass on as his genes by desiring healthy young women who appear to have the best chance of reproductive success. You’ve got to pity the poor guy—he’s not only led by his dick, but also he can’t escape his Stone Age sensibilities. He may resemble a modern man, but when it comes to the opposite sex, his behavior can sometimes betray his ape ancestry.